Surfers turning to Firefox

Despite the launch of a new version late last year, Microsoft's browser software, Internet Explorer, has continued to decline in popularity.

However, it still had a massive 79.1 per cent of the browser market in February this year, down from 79.8 per cent in January. Mozilla's open-source rival to IE, Firefox, has grabbed some of the market share to claim second place with 14.2 per cent, according to figures from Net Applications.

"After a minor hiccup in January, Firefox seems to be back on the offensive in February 2007. January showed a brief halt to Firefox's assault on Microsoft Internet Explorer's market share," said Vincent Vizzaccaro of Net Applications.

Internet Explorer accounted for 84.7 per cent of the market back in March 2006 and despite launching IE7 in November last year it has steadily been in decline.

Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 at around the same time and grabbed half of a percentage point in the space of a month, jumping from 13.5 to 14 per cent between November and December 2006. It then slipped to 13.7 per cent in January before climbing to an all-time high in February.

Visitors to www.webuser.co.uk are more inclined to use Firefox than the average internet user, it seems, with 20.7 per cent of visitors to the site in February using Mozilla's browser. Internet Explorer was still the most popular, though, with 75.4 per cent of visitors preferring Microsoft's application.

http://www.netapplications.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.mozilla.org/